Selling Data

A profit-maximizing monopolist sells multi-attribute consumer data to a firm. The seller is uncertain about which consumer characteristic the buyer is interested in forecasting and how much the buyer values information. In order to screen among buyers along both margins, the seller chooses a menu of statistics of the data and the price of each statistic. I obtain two results. First, the seller optimally offers statistics that are linear combinations of the data. Second, the seller might need to offer a continuum of statistics, and these statistics are less correlated than they would be if the seller could perfectly discriminate